Breathe.

"Tell me how I'm supposed to breathe with no air?
Can't live, can't breathe with no air
It's how I feel whenever you ain't there
There's no air, no air"

(No Air - Fauntleroy, Griggs, Mason, Thomas, Russell).


It has been a tough week, tougher than normal. It is not related to Jasper and his autism, rather it is a 'family issue', but it is bound to have some effect on him due to his need for calm and routine.

First drama was Zac (17) throwing a party - complete with 4 bands and copious amounts of alcohol - while we were away on holidays, a holiday he did not wish to come on. Stupidly I allowed him to stay home (what was I thinking?) with ONE very simple rule.........'No one is to come to the house while we are not home'. The result at this stage is that Zac has decided he is going to leave home. How this directly relates to Jasper is that, as it is, he constantly asks daily where each family member is (a large number of times) and gets upset when he has not seen one of us for any length of time - particularly Brayden (20) who no longer lives at home.

This leads nicely to the second drama - Brayden came home for a few nights only to break the devastating news to me that he is travelling to Canada for the next 12 months, maybe more. The only way I can explain how I feel about this is to liken it to not being able to breathe - I have literally stopped breathing, forgotten how. He has my blessing and I know it will be a great experience for him (he has such wanderlust) but how am I going to live without him, he is going to be so far away, already I feel the pain of missing him and he hasn't gone anywhere. As for how Jasper is going to cope - he adores Brayden and is always so excited when he comes home. He has real trouble comprehending where Brayden is as he only ever sees us putting him on the train, therefore he thinks (I think) that Brayden lives on the train. We tell him "Brayden has gone to Melbourne on the train" (or "Brayden is at work in Melbourne") but for this reason we can not go anywhere near the train station because Jasper thinks we are going to see Brayden - so I avoid driving past it at all costs.

When we dropped Brayden at the station on Friday Jasper sobbed all the way home "Where's Brayden" "I want to see Brayden". He doesn't understand and it causes so much angst - how on earth is he going to comprehend Brayden is in another country. What if he forgets him?

During the week we had our first session of Early Intervention for the year. Apparently the funding has been cut so instead of a session every fortnight he will only have one session a month (as well as only one session of speech therapy). On the up side, now that we have his official diagnosis we can call Autism Victoria to apply for funding of our own. Not sure of the fine details of this until I speak to them (I will post about this at a later stage).

We also had an appointment with Family Support but I don't feel we need (at this stage) the service they offer - I was expecting support in the way of respite, which is my greatest need at the moment. This is provided by a different organisation but I decided that rather than looking into that any further I would try to get him an extra day at creche. That way things are familiar and we are not introducing 'another' thing into his life to learn to cope with. He will now attend creche on Monday mornings (for respite for me) as well as his regular Wednesday/Thursday while I am at work.